Neighborhood Watch

A letter in response to George Packer’s article (February 9 & 16, 2009)

George Packer, in his article on the housing crisis in Florida, describes Belmont Heights as “a mostly black slum” (“The Ponzi State,” February 9th & 16th). Belmont Heights is a mixed-income housing development designed in a Southern Craftsman style and built to replace the crime-ridden, deteriorating public housing of the past. I live at the edge of the development, and walk my dog there daily, because Belmont Heights’s streets are better maintained than the rest in the neighborhood. The area around Belmont Heights and the neighborhood’s business district have been neglected by the City of Tampa and the State of Florida. Long before the inverted pyramid schemes and corrupt lending practices of recent times, the construction of I-4 in the nineteen-sixties redefined the general area of Ybor City, and consequently left generations of native Floridians, mostly African-Americans, on the wrong side of the highway. With the quintessential Floridian fetish for façade, the state built a useless and now nonfunctioning $1.3 million fountain near the overpass. A few blocks north, empty lots lie fallow and overgrown, mattresses and other discarded trash pile up on street corners, sidewalks abruptly end, and streets are in continual disrepair.